Games– digital games and boardgames and sports and childhood pastimes, the whole bunch– are all escapist activities. Even games with grim messages and furrow-browed insights into our real world provide release and respite from that world. Games are governed by fixed rules we can learn to understand, and this in itself is a liberating and entertaining alternative to the real world. In short: games are escapist because they are games. They can be more or less escapist, yes, but they’re escapist.

Games which undermine their own escapism are, however, increasingly common. In Dragon Age: Origins, an NPC infamously sells you his own DLC. Free-to-play games can occasionally make their cash shops extremely intrusive. Facebook gaming has birthed an entire genre of games which are, essentially, fancy eggtimers: they turn your attention not to the world of the game, but back out into your own world, to your own mundane schedules and time commitments, asking you to plan and schedule your real life to accomodate the demands of the game.

These games are all still escapist actvities. A Facebook game has created an alternate reality in which I am both Laura Michet, the lowly contract employee, and Laura Michet the cafe owner, or farm owner, or what have you. That’s escapist on some level. Not profoundly so– not even always entertainingly so– but there you go: I’ve got a fancy little city, or farm, or digital cafe. It can occupy some of my time, and I can use it to pretend that I’m not who I really am.

If I do this– if I choose to escape in this way– I’ll have to accept that there’s a store hiding up there in the corner of my screen trying to sell me fancy crops or recipes or tickets to skip the boring bits of the game.  As a person with little income, reminders that I am a consumer are bothersome to me. They kill the mood. They cancel out my sense of escapism. Having a strict budget takes all the fun out of “free to play”– it makes my experiences more tense. It makes it harder for me to relax.

If I want to get away from that, then, I can go play Red Dead Redemption–which asks me in the start menu, every time I turn it on, to see if there’s any DLC I can buy. Or I could play New Vegas, which asks me the same thing. I tolerate this because I have to, but also because I don’t care enough to feel that bad about it. And, of course, I enjoy DA:O despite the awful NPC-DLC fiasco. These games are all good games. They’ve got enough in the base product to keep me thoroughly entertained. There is, then, a degree of business-minded intrusion into my escapism which I do accept, and even welcome: I’ve played some mighty fine DLC over the past two years.

Basically, I and most other people now accept, without question, that our escapist spaces can also be, to one degree or another, consumer spaces.

I think this is what bugs a lot of the people who are still roaringly angry at the very idea of DLC. Traditional PC games have done the expansion-pack thing for over a decade, but it was never this intrusive. You can play Age of Empires at home alone and never even realize that there was an expansion pack and a Gold Edition. Even Oblivion, with its slew of overpriced DLC houses and horse armors, never allowed the game itself to become a consumer environment. Once you buy the game, it’s a purely escapist bit of entertainment. Once you’re in the game, you can pretend you belong there: that you never bought it, but were born there, this silent wanderer in her battered Mithril Helmet, with her implausible Glass Longsword. The world where you bought the game has vanished– or you’ve hidden from it very well, at least. You could play this game alone forever and never even know that the infamous Horse Armor exists.

Lately, though, many games are becoming actual stores.

There’s a few good reasons why this has happened. First of all, it’s effective. DLC is a gold mine: many AAA developers are charging a sixth of their base game’s price– ten dollars or so– for additional material that adds up to less than one or two percent of the base game’s content. If putting advertisements for DLC in games makes more people buy– well, it’s working, isn’t it?

Secondly– and this is more important– visiting a store is even more escapist for a lot of people than games are. I’m not convinced that the act of purchase can ever be a true escape from reality, what with money being real and all, but window-shopping is fun. Being a consumer– even a potential consumer– can be fun. These days, browsing PC hardware websites and imagining the desktop I’ll build for myself once I save up is a pretty good way for me to escape. Many people find browsing the Steam store to be a pleasant experience. Why shouldn’t they or others take similar pleasure from browsing stores inside games? Despite the wailing that continues in some corners, there’s no going back from this: it’s already very deeply rooted and totally acceptable.

Thirdly, ‘what games are’ is also changing. Games are services, not just products. Games are environments, not just activities. Games are places where we do things. Shopping is a thing that people do. Because games are places, is there a good reason why we shouldn’t shop in them? We shop everywhere else, and downloading things like DLC from inside a game is now easier than  buying them from stores, and sometimes easier than buying them from online portals.

But it’s not just a ‘tech thing’ that makes this possible– it’s also a culture thing. There are now very few areas of our lives where we are not made constantly conscious of our role as consumers. Is this the same ‘culture thing’ which turned police brutality protests in London several months ago into a multi-day fiasco featuring angry, deprived teens exercising their purchase desires with violence? Are we so thoroughly consumers now that we’d rather not ever be separated from that identity, not even while fighting the fuzz? Not even while playing a game?

Am I bothered by this? I suppose I am. I like DLC when it’s meaty and interesting, and I like that I can browse Steam and XBLA without leaving my house, but I wish that I didn’t have to be conscious of my role as a consumer while I play certain kinds of games, particularly games with strong immersive or intricately escapist tendencies. (I’d much rather be conscious of my role as a dual-specced arcane warrior/blood mage elf.)

Clearly, however, this doesn’t bother too many players, and it certainly doesn’t bother a lot of designers. A certain kind of player enthusiastically welcomes it.

And times are changing: sometimes I imagine that in about thirty years, this kind of thing will not bother me one bit.

I also imagine that the world I’ll be cheerfully living in thirty years from now would make current-day-me a little bit queasy.

However, Glitch is still based on a traditionalist MMO foundation, and there’s a lot in it which is pretty darn typical and derivative. No matter how much I enjoy the interesting new places they’ve taken this game, Glitch’s creators are shackling some of those innovations to an ancient paradigm, and sometimes I wonder whether that will end up keeping the game floating low in the water.

First of all: this game is a grinding nightmare. Until extremely high skill levels, the only way to get any kind of resource is to grind away at producing it. And, yes: you can grind mining. And yes: loads and loads of people do. Whenever I sit down to mine repetitively, I’m reminded strongly of the short time I spend playing World of Warcraft. Grinding agricultural resources is more interesting, since the animals you harvest food from sometimes run away– but it’s still incredibly repetitive. And it costs energy to grind resources, meaning that you’ll need to turn a lot of those resources right around and make food to keep from running out of energy and dying. Many major crafting projects in Glitch, at low or medium skill levels, will take hours of repetitious clicking to accomplish. At higher levels, the rewards you get for each action increase, and some of them no longer require as many steps, so you’ll end up with a lot more stuff, and a lot more interesting things to do with it– but until then, grinding is the game’s foundation.

Making items is also a bit of a drag. It’s menu-based; ‘tool’ items simply enable crafting menus, like in plenty of other traditional MMOs. The game is based around crafting, so you tend to see a lot of these menus; sometimes I feel like I’m spending half my time in menus, watching progress bars tick. It makes me wonder why the developers resorted to traditionalist crafting systems when they managed to revamp so many more-entrenched MMO paradigms elsewhere in the game.

As it is now, however, Glitch also falls prey to the classic MMO inventory-management disaster. Unlike Minecraft, which makes up for its wide array of objects and tools with an intuitive click-and-drag inventory system and the ability to expand storage indefinitely, Glitch’s inventory interface is limited and difficult to use. This, coupled with the fact that I must carry around twenty-seven different tools in order to use all of my current skills– and many more items in order to do anything with those skills– makes dealing with tools and items a pretty big hassle. Every time I deal with the never-ending problem of my many item bags, I’m reminded, again, of World of Warcraft, where item-bagging is a bit of an art. And unlike Minecraft, which encourages players to stick close to a home base and only take what they need for a certain task, the world of Glitch is so big and sprawling, and the skills so interdependent, that I need to carry practically all my stuff around with me at every moment in order to accomplish anything at all. It’s irritating to get bogged down in this kind of stuff when the rest of the game is so refreshing and different.

Bit let’s face it: people actually enjoy grinding, and they’re willing to put up with inventory bullshit. They’ve done it in a million games before, and they’ll do it in a million others. There’s enough in Glitch to make dealing with these things worth it. Even if you’re the kind of person who can’t stand a progress bar, I’d take a look at Glitch, if just to sample the weird atmosphere and get a taste of the writing (which is incredibly good, by the way) and the community (which is refreshing). The character customization system– which I haven’t discussed, since I like it but find it less interesting than the game’s mechanics– is also pretty charming.

Let’s put it this way: in Glitch, I’m actually a drug dealer. That’s something I hope to write about soon: how to be a drug dealer in a charming game about cooperation and friendship. Any game that can pull this off with such panache is definitely something to take a look at.

Glitch recently closed its servers in order to execute the final player reset before its big release. I’d stay tuned for a chance to sign up within the next few weeks.

I wrote this months ago, during our dry spell, only a few days after Portal 2 came out. Because we are lazy and slow, you finally get to see it… today! Wahoo!

I’m going to do the English Major thing and talk about Portal 2’s story for a bit. Forgive me if I don’t dwell on the game mechanics: I thought they were perfect, I adored the new puzzle elements, and I have nothing else to say about it, not even “oh gosh it was very good” since everyone has been saying that for a while now.

But the story’s tone has changed dramatically since the first game, and that’s what I want to talk about. “Oh,” you might say, “changed dramatically? I didn’t notice!” And that’s okay, because the changes pretty subtle. But they’re also pretty important.

Something you rarely see in action games or movies these days is the Alien/Aliens protagonist-antagonist relationship: two energetic and capable ladyfolk who fight each other to the deadly death with dignity. In Alien, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley performs heroics in a rather gender-neutral way. The fact that she is a woman isn’t relevant to her relationship with the monster. In Aliens, that changes– Ripley plays surrogate mother to a child and duels an evil alien brood-mother whose spawn are the stuff of nightmares. But the dignity of their struggle remains: it’s “Ripley the human versus the evil alien,” not just “some human chick versus an evil alien.”

To me, Portal 1 was very much like these films. Two female characters dueling to the deadly death on terms unlimited by the fact that they are ladyfolk? The antagonist is an inhuman freak? The protagonist strengthened by her humanity (in this case, by the fact that the player identifies very, very closely with her)? Sounds an awful lot like Alien to me.

In both of these works, it’s the relationship between the protagonist and her nemesis that controls the entire mood and meaning of the story. I’ve read somewhere that Chell was made a female specifically to support a desired tone for the protagonist-villain relationship; to some degree, the same is true for Alien. Both Portal and the Alien films controlled these relationships incredibly well–mostly by maintaining the characters’ dignity.

Portal 2 changes the tone of its central relationship by stripping some of that dignity away. Glados insults Chell constantly in ways intended to be understood as cattily “female”: calling Chell overweight, insulting her appearance, and so on. She seems to believe that gendered insults will be the most effective against this mute, implacable enemy, and tries a variety of them. And even though these jokes are, cheap and awful, they’re fantastic.

"Hey, Chell! You suck!" "..."

One of my favorite jokes in the game has Glados ‘discovering’ ancient official paperwork that calls Chell’s outfit stupid. First, Glados pretends to commiserate with her– how could this foolish, male scientist know anything about Chell’s clothes? Then Glados reveals that the paperwork writer was a woman… with a medical degree… in fashion… from France! The delivery is magnificent, and the implication– “The only way I can harm you emotionally is by making you feel like you’re bad at being a woman”– is equally hilarious in context, since we know that Glados is pathetic and that Chell is powerful no matter who she is (because she is us, and we are powerful).

So, Portal 2 focuses our attention on the fact that the protagonist and antagonist are both women in a way that Portal 1 never did. Glados transforms from a grim threat to a cattily (but delightfully) irritating snarker even before she’s stripped of her deadly powers. Some of her dignity as a female antagonist is lost–but it’s lost in a way that’s useful and productive. Portal 2 doesn’t say the same things about its characters that Aliens said, but the things it says are not the less meaningful because its some of those characters are no longer dignified.

See: Portal 2 is about watching people become pathetic. It’s about watching people debase themselves, about watching them fall from power and glory, about watching the strong become weak, about seeing the things they fear and hate finally come to them. The moral I took away from Portal 2? Everyone is pathetic. Everyone is pathetic in a hilarious way! And when we fight each other on petty terms, we only make ourselves more pathetic.

A pair of pathetic losers

Out of all the characters in the story, Chell maintains her dignity– mostly because she can’t possibly participate in the insult-flinging, thanks to the game’s design. While Wheatley and Glados claw at each other, Chell silently saves Aperture Science. While Glados is paralyzed and embarrassed by painful self-discovery, Chell is secure in her self-confidence (a self-confidence that is, in fact, the player’s). While Wheatly demonstrates his incompetence, Chell demonstrates her supreme competence by completing the game’s hardest levels.

So, when Glados assaults Chell using “female” insults, sliding into a mode of behavior often cruelly stereotyped as “female”, the audience isn’t made to accept these things– instead, we laugh at them. We know that Chell is above them. We know that Glados, as a robot, is only saying these things because she believes that this is how humans think. But it isn’t how Chell thinks! Chell, the real woman here, would never behave that way. Because we’re made the harassed target of these gender-focused insults, we see, first-hand, how stupid they are. We maintain our dignity, and Chell continues to be a female protagonist we can respect– mostly because she’s a shell, incapable of participating in the guts of the argument. Her personality is our agency. We know she’s not stupid, or fat, or even bothered by the insults, because we’re not!

(And, in the end, maybe we learn a little bit about how dumb gendered insults are.)

Glados, however, doesn’t remain forever in this frantic, undignified state. In our final conversation with her, it’s obvious that she’s been changed by her experiences and that she’s returned to the self-posession of her earlier life. You’ve improved each another through your antagonism. She bids you goodbye with hilarious respect– this song, of course, exemplifies that– and leaves you to your own devices, confident that you can survive and excel on your own. We know that Glados can do the same. You’re both professionals, Glados suggests. You are each very, very good at your own things. And you can respect each other for that. Nevermind the things she said earlier! You’ve been through Idiot Hell together!

It’s a bit astonishing when you take the time to figure out how this message is conveyed to us. Portal 2 is one of the only games I’ve played that sends a perfectly positive message about gender while being almost entirely petty and ironic about it. Which is to say: it’s a clever story. It treats its players like clever people. And it makes some interesting points about how sarcasm and irony can be conveyed in the very mechanics of a game– how the demonstrable proof of a player’s actions can be used to prove  rhetoric false.

I’d love to see another game where ideas are judged with a player’s actions.

4) …a place of fulfillment

There’s another aspect to the weird kind of cheerfulness that the Bitizens have. Everyone, as I mentioned, has their Dream Job. Some Bitizens will have a 9 in Services, and and a Dream Job in the Dentist’s Office. Some will have an 8 in Creative, and a Dream Job in the Cake Studio.

And some Bitizens will have a 9 in Food Service, and a Dream Job in the Sub Shop, where I will employ them and where they will work for the rest of their lives, living at the same quality as the doctors in the Optometrist or the high-flying designers in the Fashion Studio. They will be just as happy (green-smiley-face-happy, to be specific– as opposed to beige-neutral-face happy or red-sad-face happy) as these fancy people, and they will, apparently, make just as much money as they do.

Where I come from, it is very bad, socially, if your dream job is making subs in a Sub Shop. It is very bad if you get that job and stay in it happily for life. Chances are you would never be happy in that job, even if it fit your capacities perfectly, because unending criticism would be levelled at you for staying there. And you’d probably grow jealous, of course, of everyone who worked doing glamorous things in some not-Sub-Shop somewhere.

In Tiny Tower, when you’re happy, you’re happy. Nobody criticizes you. Nobody urges you to move upward. No job is any more challenging than any other. No job is any more stressful. No job is any more worthy.

When you’ve got a green smiley face, you’ve got a green smiley face. Nobody questions a green smiley face.